THE BULLIED BRIDGE

Children’s murals on pedestrian span were meant to welcome visitors on I-5, but years of graffiti have taken a toll

In 1994, a work of art debuted above Interstate 5, on a pedestrian bridge linking Chicano Park and Barrio Logan’s Kearney Avenue. “El Portal de la Historia” was many things: Mural, expression of community pride, greeting to commuters.

“This is a disaster, an abusive disaster,” said Torres, 76, a community activist and artist who has painted and restored Chicano Park’s celebrated murals for decades. “I have tremendous sympathy for our children, for our children’s hearts. They cannot, in my estimation, be represented by this mess here.”

If El Portal now offends the eye, it also assaults the nose. Pedestrians on the overpass must dodge piles of garbage and human waste. The students’ art — every inch of it — is buried under chaotic swirls of aerosol paint. Salas’ bright red-and-gray pattern is submerged beneath more dark splotches.

Once a bright representation of a neighborhood’s aspirations, El Portal has become the arts equivalent of a sewage spill.

But who will clean up this mess? After initially denying responsibility, the California Department of Transportation has admitting to owning the bridge and mural, and pledged to restore this work of art.

When?

“A schedule has not been determined,” said Cathryne Bruce-Johnson, a Caltrans spokeswoman.

Grubby preliminaries

El Portal is the remnant of the ambitious “City Gates” project. In the late 1980s, San Diego announced that four works of art would be erected over freeways near the city’s northern, southern, eastern and western boundaries, bidding motorists welcome and farewell.

This bold dream quickly encountered harsh financial realities. The four gates became two, then one. That lone survivor, South Gate, saw its budget drop from $150,000 to $100,000 to zero.

“We were told ‘Congratulations, but we have bad news — you won, but the money is going to go to another project,’ ” Salas recalled. “There’s honor in that, but not much work.”

Some wondered why this honor hadn’t gone to local painters. An independent jury had awarded the project to Brailsford, Chacon and Salas, rather than any of the artists who had created the celebrated murals already gracing Chicano Park.

“Roberto was from El Paso and I’m a white woman from Massachusetts,” said Brailsford, who now lives in Dulzura. “But we won this contract legitimately.”

Without funding, though, the contract meant little. Gail Goldman, the city’s newly hired public art director, worked her sources until March 1990, when she landed a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. One string was attached: these funds had to be matched. The city agreed to furnish the other $20,000.

With the grubby preliminaries out of the way, the artists could focus on creating. For these adults, it was time to go back to school.

Superheroes and sharks

Chacon focused on Brooklyn Elementary, Brailsford on Balboa Elementary. At both schools, teachers were invited to volunteer pupils for this project.

“They were simple yet effective,” said Salas. “As you walked by, you had this great, big image.”

The kids drew whatever they could imagine: a boat sailing toward a grinning shark; dinosaurs munching on TV sets; a Hispanic superhero, Batvato. There were mythical creatures and fantasies rooted in real life. One painting showed a woman behind bars, crying, while her daughter — the artist — waited on the outside.

“She wanted to bring her mother to the mural when she got out of jail,” Brailsford said, “so she could see what her daughter had been doing in school.”

Brailsford, Chacon and Salas selected more than 40 images, then had them transferred onto porcelain enameled steel plates.

“They were as impervious as possible to damage and graffiti,” said Goldman, now a public art consultant in La Jolla. “It was a surface that could be easily cleaned.”

The plates, 27 by 60 inches, were bolted to the top of the bridge, capping Salas’ wall of Aztec red and gray waves.

Throughout the mural’s creation and installation, officials from the California Department of Transportation “were terrific, terrific partners,” said Goldman.

The artists strove to acquire even more partners. During a workshop at Centro Cultural de la Raza, Salas explained how the new work reflected and honored Chicano Park’s long history of murals. Salas’ audience included Victor Ochoa, a local muralist who had unsuccessfully competed for the El Portal contract. Nonetheless, Ochoa urged “ever greater images for El Portal de la Historia,” Brailsford noted in a memo.

When the mural opened to the public, some marveled at this ambitious project’s smooth execution.

“It’s exactly what we said it would look like,” Brailsford told a reporter in May 1994. “The porcelain enamel did what it was supposed to do.”

Then the vandals struck.

Fungus

In January, Chicano Park won a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. This urban refuge was born in the 1970 demonstrations against the scars caused by construction of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Activist artists like Torres decided to answer ugliness with beauty.

“Just like Cesar says,” Torres said on a recent afternoon. He pointed to his paint-speckled overalls where he had pinned a button with an image of Cesar Chavez and the words “Nonviolence is our strength.”

For decades, Chicano Park’s murals have served as soaring rebuttals to the bridge’s concrete insults. Painted on pillars and buttresses, they are uniformly bright, various in theme — political, mythological, whimsical — and credited to dozens of artists.

“This is a collective effort,” said Torres, who painted several of these works. “When the collective effort is being attacked and bullied, we need to act.”

While Torres did not have a hand in creating El Portal, he insists that it be protected from graffiti. Yet the mural’s location makes this a challenge. “Bullying” occurs out of sight of anyone other than people strolling across or motorists speeding beneath the pedestrian bridge.

Goldman, who left the city’s public art office in 2000, recalls that graffiti was an ongoing issue with El Portal.

“But I had negotiated an arrangement with Caltrans — we would provide the paint if they would paint out the graffiti,” she said. “Caltrans did that for a long time. I don’t know at what point they decided they could not afford to to that.”

The expense was significant. In 2006, the city paid Salas $15,000 to repair and restore the mural.

By then, though, El Portal was being cleaned infrequently — and tagged frequently.

“Graffiti is a fungus and fungus is growing,” Torres said. “If it isn’t treated, it will consume everything.”

Portions indicate that San Diego is responsible for El Portal: “For the lifetime of the PROJECT, the CITY shall maintain and repair the PROJECT …”

What’s the “lifetime” of a mural? A later paragraph estimates “the PROJECT’S life to be 15 years.”

And there’s this: “Finished PROJECT shall become the property of CALTRANS once it is accepted by the CITY.”

Caltrans, though, initially denied any ownership interest in the mural — or its site.

“That pedestrian bridge belongs to the city,” Caltrans’ Bruce-Johnson said in early July. “The pedestrian bridge is not ours.”

By mid-July, though, Bruce-Johnson reversed herself: “Caltrans owns the structure of the El Portal de la Historia,” she wrote, “and we are working in partnership with the Chicano Park Steering Committee to determine the best way to remove the graffiti and still preserve the mural.”

Several calls to the committee’s chairwoman, Tommie Camarillo, were not returned.

For now, what was designed as a bright welcome to motorists and a source of neighborhood pride, is an unwelcome sight.

“Every time I drive on that freeway,” Brailsford said, “I look up and think, this needs to be restored.”

Torres agreed. “We need to take off those panels, take off the graffiti, see if we can preserve the children’s art,” he said. “That’s the goal — to save the children’s art from bullying.”